Category: Free Articles

If you are prone to yeast infections you are probably wondering what preventing yeast infections steps you can take to cut the number of times you have to suffer. Since yeast infections are caused by the Candida albicans fungus that is always present in your body, your best bet for lessening the outbreaks is to find the things that allow the Candida to grow unchecked and turn into an infection.

Many things will allow the Candida to become overgrown. Basically anything that throws the PH balance in your body off can help the Candida to grow. Some of the most common culprits are antibiotics, birth control pills, steroids, hormonal changes due to menopause and your monthly cycle and too much stress.

There are some other things that contribute to the overgrowth of Candida. Candida thrives in moist warm areas of the body, keep these to a minimum and you can help lessen the number of infections that you get.

Here are some ideas:

1. Make sure that you thoroughly dry your vaginal area after a bath or shower (or when you go swimming). Keeping this area dry will help to curtail the growth of the Candida.

2. Tight clothing that doesn’t allow your body to ‘breathe’ can also encourage the growth of the Candida which can eventually lead to an infection. Clothing that is made out of nylon is particularly bad. Try to avoid wearing nylon underwear or panty hose. Instead wear thigh highs and cotton underwear.

Synthetics are notorious for cutting off air flow. This only makes an already moist environment even more hot and moist and that can contribute to the growth of Candida, which is definitely not what you want to happen.

3. Of course keeping your vaginal area clean is a given when it comes to preventing yeast infections.

4. Take off your wet bathing suit as quickly as possible after you’ve gone for a swim. Also make sure to keep your suit clean. Sometimes it’s easy to think that if you’re swimming in a pool the chlorine will keep your suit from getting dirty but it still needs to be thoroughly washed and allowed to dry completely before the next use.

5. When you wipe yourself make sure you wipe from front to back so you don’t transfer yeast from the rectum to the vagina.

6. Do not douche. Douching actually can make things worse since it disrupts the natural balance that keeps the Candida in check in the first place. Your body is best at regulating the Ph, don’t trust a man made product to do it the right way.

7. Stay away from any feminine sprays or scented soaps. Also don’t take a bubble bath since this can irritate the vagina. Try not to use scented feminine pads or scented toilet paper since all of these things can cause irritation.

8. Eating yogurt that contains live cultures can help keep your levels in balance. Lactobacilius acidophilis can help your system keep the balance it needs to stay healthy.

While you don’t have complete control over what your body does, there are some simple things you can do to cut back on the number of yeast infections you do get. Preventing yeast infections can be as simple as changing the type of toilet paper you use.

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Summary:
Many parents make the decision to homeschool their children, and in doing so are privy to some clear benefits. Homeschooling allows you to tailor a specific education to your child’s individual needs, something that is often lacking in the public or private school systems. Homeschooling also allows you and your child to learn together, creating not only a valuable learning experience but strengthening family bonds. Add to this the fact that it is often prohibitively expensive…

Keywords:
home schooling, homeschooling

Article Body:
Many parents make the decision to homeschool their children, and in doing so are privy to some clear benefits. Homeschooling allows you to tailor a specific education to your child’s individual needs, something that is often lacking in the public or private school systems. Homeschooling also allows you and your child to learn together, creating not only a valuable learning experience but strengthening family bonds. Add to this the fact that it is often prohibitively expensive to send multiple children to private schools, and we can see why homeschooling has become increasingly popular.

One of the most important aspects of homeschooling your child is coming up with a clear plan and set of goals. One of the greatest aspects of homeschooling – its complete flexibility – can also be one of the most difficult if it is not approached directly. Without a clear plan, you run the risk of creating a scattershot education that puts your child out of place with his or her peers.

So when you begin homeschooling, you should come up with a clear set of general goals. Think about why you want to homeschool your children, and what you want them to get out of the experience. What, generally, do you want your child’s education to encompass? Once you have answered these general questions for yourself, begin to split your child’s education into various subject areas. For each subject area, you want to come up with a timeline and set of goals.

A good place to start in terms of a timeline would be to look at the standard curriculum for your child’s grade in a public or private school. While it is almost certainly true that one of these reasons you’ve selected to homeschool your child is to go beyond and outside this standard curriculum, you also want to make sure that your child does not fall behind his or her peers in a given subject area.

Come up with your plan by looking at the standard expectations for a given subject level and then working backwards: how do you want to achieve that level of knowledge? What are the targets for each week? By setting these targets you can establish a timeline and curriculum that allows for effective homeschooling.

Clearly, one of the points of homeschooling is its relative flexibility, and you by no means need to stick to a plan in a completely rigid manner, but don’t let this tempt you into avoiding one: although it may seem wonderful to have an entirely “organic” education for your children, this can easily go awry. If you constantly let your child’s learning be dictated exclusively by his or her interests, gaps will appear in her knowledge. Instead make a clear educational plan that allows for flexibility. Plan what your child is going to learn, but leave the “how she will learn it” some breathing room: as you begin the process of homeschooling you’ll learn how your child learns best, and can begin to incorporate this into the lessons.

By coming up with a clear educational plan you arm yourself with one of the most essential tools to effective homeschooling.

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590

Summary:
Some persuasion techniques can be learned in a few minutes and used today. Here are some of the simplest and most effective.

Keywords:
persuasion techniques, persuasion, subliminal persuasion

Article Body:
Some of the best persuasion techniques have been developed from NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) methods. For example, if you hear a person saying, “I see,” a few times, they are probably processing information visually, according to NLP. To influence them then, you would use phrases like, “You can see how…” or you would actually show them things. A more auditory person would be influenced by, “I hear what you’re saying,” and “Listen.”

Notice if they use visual, aural, or kinesthetic words. If you want to convince your spouse to go to the Bahamas, it makes a difference which words you use. “We’ll be feeling that sun on our backs,” is not the same as “We’ll see sunny beaches,” or We’ll listen to the waves at night.” You may use all of these, but one of the three types of words will be more influential for most people.

More Persuasion Techniques

1. Use a person’s name. You have undoubtedly heard salesmen use and abuse this technique. Maybe a statement like “Look Steve, you can see the benefits of this…” just turns you off. Using a person’s name IS a powerful persuasion technique, but there is more subtlety and art to persuasion than just following simple rules.

People do love to hear their own name, but you have to be careful how you use it. First of all, use it how they want to hear it. Ask how they prefer to be addressed. A Mike may not like “Michael,” and a Joseph may be irritated by you calling him “Joe.”

Second, use it at the right time. Unless you are great at reading people and know it is okay, don’t say “Hi Betty!” the moment she walks into your office. Wait until there is a bit of rapport, and sometimes even ask permission (“Is it okay if I call you Betty?”).

2. Use motivating words. Say “think about,” they’ll do that. It is not a call to action. Use words like “today,” and “now,” and “do this.” Many subliminal experts will tell you that even using “by now,” repetitively, as in “By now you can see that this car is luxurious,” is subconsciously taken as “buy now.”

Remember to use THEIR words. If they use the word “efficient” often, then it’s an important word to them. Start using it: “You can see how efficient this RV is in it’s use of space.” Pay attention and pick out any words they use often. Persuasion is easier when you speak the same “language.”

3. Be a chameleon. Change your language to more closely match theirs. Slow or accelerate your speech to match theirs. Sit in the same position that they sit in. Use the same facial expressions. Laugh when they laugh.

This technique is called “mirroring and matching,” and, when done well, you can establish rapport quickly and easily with most people. Most people will never notice you’re doing this, but don’t be too obvious. The person will just feel like you’re like they are, that you can “relate” to them. A bond will begin to develop between you, and you can test this bond by “leading.”

This means that once you have established the bond, you can change your body posture, to see if they unconsciously do the same. If so, they are ready to follow. You continue to mirror and match, but you also start to lead them right to the bottom line on the contract, or to whatever action you want them to take. This is one of the more powerful persuasion techniques.

Affiliate Search Engine Programs

You can find an affiliate program almost anything nowadays — including affiliate search engine programs. Although the list has decreased greatly in the past years, there are still some search engines that give you, as an affiliate, a part of what they earn if you refer their service to others. These affiliate search engine programs are not offered by the big search engines such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, but you might be able to get some commissions by promoting them. Many people are fed up with Google and all of their “unfair” rules and rule changes that happen overnight. And they could be looking for other options.

The most recognized search engine that offers an affiliate program is 7Search. It is also one of the few remaining. The 7Search affiliate program is a Pay-Per-Search program and it advertises over 14,000 participating affiliates. You can earn commissions in two ways: by installing a search box on your website, and then getting a commission when someone does a search, or through direct text links to search results. You make three and a half cents per search or 63 percent of the revenue share from all of your text links. You could also decide to accept a bit lower rate for each search that is performed in exchange for earning credits at the 7Searches mother company’s (Emergency24) banner exchange program. You get paid on your commissions every 3 months and you must have earned at least 25 dollars for your check to be sent out. Otherwise, your earnings accrue until you meet the 25 dollar mark.

In general, 7Search seems to be a popular choice for many marketers both for its PPC results and its affiliate programs. Claims from those who have used the PPC platform to advertise their sites and businesses are that their ads are getting viewed by a large, targeted market, and returns on investments are very impressive. Those who participate in the affiliate program also claim to earn a decent share and they do get paid on time.

When you sign up to be an affiliate, you get a search engine box that you can put into your website and when your usual visitors come in, they can easily use this box to do their next searches. When they do this, you make money since the box that you are given has its own code that is specific to you and your earnings. You will not be able to make a living off of this type of affiliate income, but it is something that you can use to enhance your current earnings. Will affiliate search engine programs come back into play again? Right now it seems that most traffic is still going through Google which is definitely at the forefront of PPC. But it’s hard to predict even what will happen with Google in the fast moving world of the web.

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Summary:
Personality testing, personality psychology and personality theories are just like peeling off an onion. They reach nowhere when you start analyzing their basics, results and ideas. But this fact does not spare you from encountering psychometrics. Read to prepare for your personality testing with a broader vision.

Keywords:
personality psychology, personality testing, personality theories, personality theory, what’s your personality, personality characteristics, psychometrics

Article Body:
It is commonly believed myth that personality testing instruments can measure your personality and predict your future behaviors. The pre-employment testing mechanism has been following this creed without any solid evidence. The testing industry claims all out validity. The educational institutions and employer organizations use them for screening purposes. Their transparency and equity has even convinced the courts of law.

But it is still an unresolved riddle; what do they test?

Do they test personality? What is personality then? What is its nature? How does it come into existence? Is it outcome of evolution? Does matter has capability to generate a personality? Why animals don’t have a personality? Does it remain the same during whole of your life? And many more questions.

It is like peeling off an onion. Every strip leads to many more. Finally you get a heap of onion strips. Where is the onion?

But personality is not an onion…

Allport has recorded hundreds of different definitions. Most of the psychologists equate it to your style, behaviors and reactions. They have devised instruments to measure these main areas. The collected data about your behaviors and temperaments help them to decide your career. You may organize your behaviors in future but you may never be able to go for a career of your passion.

Why?

Experts like to predict. They predict weather. They predict political situations. They predict economic conditions. They predict your future with signs, numbers, cards or palms. And they predict your future performance with the help of personality testing instruments.

What’s Your Personality?
———————–

It is well recognized fact that every human being has a personality. It is not merely your physical body. It is not merely your consciousness. It is not merely your ego. It is not merely your behaviors. It is not merely your physical expression. It is not merely your style. It is not merely your temperament.

But they all and many other characteristics are expressions of your personality.

I don’t find it wise to define personality. Admittedly it is an abstract reality. You get it with your birth. You can either develop it or disintegrate. Your style, behaviors and reactions are expressions of your developed, undeveloped or under-developed personality.

How do you look? How do you react? How do you talk? How do you live? How do you think? They all are expressions of your personality. The psychometrics measures these expressions and not your personality.

The abstract nature of personality can neither be measured nor be analyzed with any scientific or non-scientific tool. It can only be visualized. It can be developed. It can be disintegrated. Your thinking and doing makes all out the difference. A developed personality gives better style, behaviors and reactions than an undeveloped one.

Why Psychometrics are Getting Popular?
—————————————

The very first reason is that every one wants to know who he is.

But bigger reason of their massive use is just a desire of the employers to avoid bad-hire. They get hundreds of applications for a single situation. They are the only available tools to avoid idiosyncrasies.

They don’t have alternatives for psychometrics.

Tests are going to stay. Whether you are trying to be admitted for a specific discipline or looking for your dream job, you are going to encounter psychometrics at one stage or the others. You need to prepare before encountering them.

How to Prepare for Personality Testing Sessions?
———————————————–

Keep in mind…

Personality is an amazing entity. You can think. You can visualize. You can discover. You can express. You can plan. You can create. You have unlimited hidden potentials. But your selected options on paper are going to decide your future.

You should practice offline and online personality tests before encountering a real session. Your practice shall not only make them familiar to you but also generate a list of your strengths and weaknesses. You can improve them with your conscious effort.

However, it is much more important to learn how different personality and aptitude tests measure expressions of your personality. What theories are working behind them? How do they relate different jobs with different types? This knowledge shall make it a lot easier to encounter psychometrics.

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755

Summary:
Be adaptable AND successful

Keywords:
Personality test, online personality test, career personality test, leadership, management

Article Body:
A hard working partner at a major law firm, John B., finds that he gets short with co-workers especially when under stress. He is not viewed as a “team player” by other members of the firm and the support staff avoid him. In spite of feedback and coaching from his colleagues, he has experienced little progress in modifying his behavior.

Judy S. struggles with balancing her personal and professional life, often finding herself overcommitted. As a VP of a large health care organization, she also serves on a number of community boards. She has difficulty saying “No” and feels guilty that she is not doing enough for her children. She has tried repeatedly to decrease her work time but seems to be busier each year.

Both of these successful people may find it difficult to change.

There is a “paradox of success,” according to the executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, reported in a Business Strategy Review article. This paradox makes it difficult for successful people to grow and improve. When things are going well, people have little motivation to change. Yet, successful people need to change before they have to change or they will plateau or even decline in effectiveness. Even the most successful leaders can increase their effectiveness by changing some elements of their behavior.

Goldsmith has worked with hundreds of executives in Fortune 100 companies and has found that successful people have four key beliefs that drive their success and, often, limit their growth. These beliefs are:

· I choose to succeed. Successful people believe that they are doing what they choose to do, because they choose to do it. They have a strong need for self-determination and do not like feeling controlled or manipulated. They believe that their behavior is a result of their choices and commitments. The “I choose to succeed” belief is highly correlated with achievement. The more we believe that our behavior is a result of our own choices and commitments, the less likely we are to want to change our behavior.
Successful people’s personal commitment can make it hard for them to change.

· I can succeed. Successful people believe that they have the internal capacity to make desirable things happen. They do not see themselves as victims of fate; rather they believe that their motivation and ability has driven their success.
Successful people often confuse correlation with causality. Because they get positive reinforcement for results, they may not have an accurate perception of what behaviors drove those results. This can result in “superstitious behavior” where the successful person repeats behavior that they believe was a factor in their success.
Successful people have difficulty realizing that they are successful “in spite” of certain behaviors, not “because of” them.

· I will succeed. A contagious sense of optimism is one of the most important characteristics of successful people. They not only believe that they can achieve, they believe that they will achieve. Because they are ambitious and goal oriented, they have difficulty saying “no” to desirable opportunities. They often equate “busyness” with success. Some successful people drown in a sea of opportunity and burn out their staff trying to complete what they have promised.
Successful people are very busy and face the danger of over commitment.

· I have succeeded. Successful people tend to have a positive interpretation of their past performance. They consistently over-rate their performance relative to their professional peers. When positive outcomes occur, they believe that their efforts were instrumental to the success. They see their history of what they have done as a validation of who they are and their personal attributes.
Successful people’s positive view of their performance can make it difficult to hear negative feedback from others.

Goldsmith has found that successful people have great difficulty in accepting input from others regarding their behavior. If the feedback does not agree with their perceptions of themselves they tend to deny the information for three reasons: 1) the input is from someone that they do see as their peer or equal in terms of success, therefore it “doesn’t count;” 2) they view input that is inconsistent with their self-image to be “incorrect” and the other person is “confused” or 3) they agree there is truth in the feedback but it could not be important since they are so successful. These are some of the reasons that feedback is not very effective with successful people.

As Denis Diderot once said, “we swallow with one gulp the lie that flatters us, and drink drop by drop the truth which is bitter to us.”

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Summary:
One of the most important symptoms of pathological narcissism (the Narcissistic Personality Disorder) is grandiosity. Grandiose fantasies (megalomaniac delusions of grandeur) permeate every aspect of the narcissist’s personality.

Keywords:

Article Body:
One of the most important symptoms of pathological narcissism (the Narcissistic Personality Disorder) is grandiosity. Grandiose fantasies (megalomaniac delusions of grandeur) permeate every aspect of the narcissist’s personality. They are the reason that the narcissist feels entitled to special treatment which is typically incommensurate with his real accomplishments. The Grandiosity Gap is the abyss between the narcissist’s self-image (as reified by his False Self) and reality.

When Narcissistic Supply is deficient, the narcissist de-compensates and acts out in a variety of ways. Narcissists often experience psychotic micro-episodes during therapy and when they suffer narcissistic injuries in a life crisis. But can the narcissist “go over the edge”? Do narcissists ever become psychotic?

Some terminology first:

The narrowest definition of psychosis, according to the DSM-IV-TR, is “restricted to delusions or prominent hallucinations, with the hallucinations occurring in the absence of insight into their pathological nature”.

And what are delusions and hallucinations?

A delusion is “a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary”.

A hallucination is a “sensory perception that has the compelling sense of reality of a true perception but that occurs without external stimulation of the relevant sensory organ”.

Granted, the narcissist’s hold on reality is tenuous (narcissists sometimes fail the reality test). Admittedly, narcissists often seem to believe in their own confabulations. They are unaware of the pathological nature and origin of their self-delusions and are, thus, technically delusional (though they rarely suffer from hallucinations, disorganised speech, or disorganised or catatonic behaviour). In the strictest sense of the word, narcissists appear to be psychotic.

But, actually, they are not. There is a qualitative difference between benign (though well-entrenched) self-deception or even malignant con-artistry – and “losing it”.

Pathological narcissism should not be construed as a form of psychosis because:

The narcissists is usually fully aware of the difference between true and false, real and make-belief, the invented and the extant, right and wrong. The narcissist consciously chooses to adopt one version of the events, an aggrandising narrative, a fairy-tale existence, a “what-if” counterfactual life. He is emotionally invested in his personal myth. The narcissist feels better as fiction than as fact – but he never loses sight of the fact that it is all just fiction.
Throughout, the narcissist is in full control of his faculties, cognisant of his choices, and goal-orientated. His behaviour is intentional and directional. He is a manipulator and his delusions are in the service of his stratagems. Hence his chameleon-like ability to change guises, his conduct, and his convictions on a dime.
Narcissistic delusions rarely persist in the face of blanket opposition and reams of evidence to the contrary. The narcissist usually tries to convert his social milieu to his point of view. He attempts to condition his nearest and dearest to positively reinforce his delusional False Self. But, if he fails, he modifies his profile on the fly. He “plays it by ear”. His False Self is extemporaneous – a perpetual work of art, permanently reconstructed in a reiterative process designed around intricate and complex feedback loops.
Though the narcissistic personality is rigid – its content is always in flux. Narcissists forever re-invent themselves, adapt their consumption of Narcissistic Supply to the “marketplace”, attuned to the needs of their “suppliers”. Like the performers that they are, they resonate with their “audience”, giving it what it expects and wants. They are efficient instruments for the extraction and consumption of human reactions.

As a result of this interminable process of fine tuning, narcissists have no loyalties, no values, no doctrines, no beliefs, no affiliations, and no convictions. Their only constraint is their addiction to human attention, positive or negative.

Psychotics, by comparison, are fixated on a certain view of the world and of their place in it. They ignore any and all information that might challenge their delusions. Gradually, they retreat into the inner recesses of their tormented mind and become dysfunctional.

Narcissists can’t afford to shut out the world because they so heavily depend on it for the regulation of their labile sense of self-worth. Owing to this dependence, they are hypersensitive and hypervigilant, alert to every bit of new data. They are continuously busy rearranging their self-delusions to incorporate new information in an ego-syntonic manner.

This is why the Narcissistic Personality Disorder is insufficient grounds for claiming a “diminished capacity” (insanity) defence. Narcissists are never divorced from reality – they crave it, and need it, and consume it in order to maintain the precarious balance of their disorganised, borderline-psychotic personality. All narcissists, even the freakiest ones, can tell right from wrong, act with intent, and are in full control of their faculties and actions.